Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.

Tuesday, 13 September 2016

Great Illustrations and The Saga of Erik the Viking

Rooting around in old junk from my childhood days, I came across The Saga of Erik the Viking - a children's fantasy adventure book written, somewhat improbably, by the Monty Python member Terry Jones. It's well worth tracking down if you can get it. Unlike most celebs-who-get-book-deals-just-because-they-are-famous around nowadays, Terry Jones can write pretty well, but what makes the book are Michael Foreman's absolutely superlative illustrations. (The same team also created the yet more wonderful Nicobobinus, which is sadly no longer in my possession.)

Have a look at some of these snaps.

Michael Foreman is first name on the team sheet in my Fantasy Football team of illustrators. If I could choose anybody to illustrate something I created, it may well be him. Is it just because these pictures are watercolour when so little else is nowadays that they are so distinctive? No, it's not just that: it's also the sense of theatricality. Look at the expressions on the faces; the drama of the poses; the larger-than-life movements; the flamboyant way the enchanter plucks the imp from his daughter's hair. There is a fine distinction between this sort of playful exaggeration and the "Look at me, I'm striking an awesome pose!" Wayne Reynolds school of fantasy art that currently dominates, but an important one, I think. One seems delicate and playful. The other seems brash and unsubtle. But there is no accounting for taste.

Jones really can write. I've just finished reading his book of fairy tales to my kids who were hungry for more after devouring the Pullman Grimms; they loved the Jones stories.

Those illustrations are marvellous. I dimly remember poring over the pink one with the wolves at someone else's house when I was a kid.

I find the dominance of the brash school of fantasy illustration in gaming products vaguely dismaying. I suspect a young John Blanche (who has much more in common with Foreman than Reynolds) might find it hard to get into gaming illustration now.

Yes, a lot of it has wandered very far from the Blanche and Ian Miller stuff of the first edition (though there was some more comic-booky stuff in there too).

I think there's also an element of Americanisation in the move towards the brash too. When I was a kid, there was a very clear contrast in the sort of illustration you'd get in White Dwarf (often quirky and imaginative, especially insider rather than on the cover) and the stuff you'd get in Dragon magazine (brasher, with improbable armour and weapons that, at the same time, weren't *aesthetically pleasing* in the way an improbable Ian Miller helmet might be). Computer games (and comic books) have, I think, accelerated a move away from the artistic-kid-in-museum-on-rainy-day attention to the forms of weapons and armour that characterised the "British style".

And there's something else too: the rise of careers as *games* illustrators. I'd hazard that many RPG/wargame illustrators today haven't done anything like John Blanche's The Prince and the Woodcutter or his contributions to the Tolkien Bestiary (awful text, great illustrations) or even Steve Jackson's Sorcery!. In short, they're games illustrators, not book illustrators. And something's lost there, I think.

I think the cover of the First Citadel Compendium, with its weird rabbity beastman is a good example of the sort of "bookish" illustration that one finds less and less often on gaming products. The same goes for even the first Warhammer cover (the one with the chaos warrior and the skeleton with the flying jaw). There's - yes - a feyness that you wouldn't get on (say) an official D&D supplement today.

As a young child, this was my favorite book for some time. The sorcerer with stones in his eyes, that horrid giant in The Land Where the Sun Goes at Night, Ragnar Forkbeard holding the star blade (?) aloft...I poached D&D ideas from it throughout my teenage years. And yes...the illustrations were sublime.

You probably know this, but Jones is something of an amateur medievalist - he wrote a controversial book on Chaucer's Knight, and did a TV series on the Middle Ages back in the 90s (IIRC). And wasn't he the main brain behind the brilliant Jabberwocky?

As far as historians go, I think that Terry Jones is one of the more accessible ones. He is a professional, as he has a degree. He speaks in a clear language which is easy to listen to, and instead of looking at the lives of the fabulously wealthy, he instead focuses on the normal people, figuring out how they lived their lives, how they thought, and examining their contributions to history.

Much of Python humor was poking at history. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, didn't have the huge death toll of the English, thus they were calling them sissies for it. BRING OUT THE COMFY CHAIR!